Fucking Fate.
She should hate him. She shouldn’t want to see him again, but all she could think about was him.
There had to be a way—some way to reach out. Make her important enough to him to see through his fantasy. But maybe, there was a way to give him both. Give him the fantasy he so desperately hunted, and give her the mate she desired.
“I’ll date them all,” he’d said to the matchmaker. She growled.
The fuck you will, Allan.
Reyna hurried back to her car and headed for Allan’s house. If her Hail Mary didn’t work, she’d live the rest of her life depressed, angry, and alone. To find a mate and lose them was the worst possible outcome a wolf could imagine.
Why couldn’t he see that?
Why couldn’t he realize what he was doing would ruin them both?
Forever.
Chapter Nine
The VonBrandt mansion loomed on the horizon for miles, even though Allan couldn’t see it. Aaron’s summons, even via text, had been laced with what-the-fuck. No one liked to make the alpha mad.
He had paperwork to drop off, but he needed to get back home and get cleaning before it was time to run. The day only had so many hours in it, and sunset seemed to come faster on days when he knew he’d be a wolf all night.
Aaron’s dining room was empty, and so was the kitchen. For a family hosting a bunch of werewolves for a moon-run, they were awfully scarce. The chairs were all pulled out, away from the big table, like people had left in a hurry.
Allan set the envelope down and scratched on it with his pen. For Aaron. He was nearly to the front door when his brother’s voice rang out behind him.
“Trying to get away without seeing me?”
Yup. Aaron’s pissed. Allan grabbed the back of his neck and rubbed at it. “Just have things to do before tonight.”
“Sit down.” His brother put on his alpha voice and pointed to the dining room. “We need to talk.”
Allan tried not to cringe when he followed the order. At least if Reyna had spanked him, he would’ve enjoyed it. With Aaron, it would just hurt.
He took his chair and got ready for his punishment.
Aaron’s eyebrows knit together. “Reyna Dubois is a beautiful, intelligent, well-connected woman who wants you, despite all of our warnings to the contrary. Wolf or not. She’s a catch.”
“How about we talk about this envelope I’m dropping off for you? As you requested.” He pushed it across the table.
His alpha put up his hand to wave the topic-change away. “Adam told me you had sex with her. This is no longer in the arena of talk about it later.”
“Of course he did.” Allan smacked his thigh hard. “He had no right to tell you…”
“You knew he’d tell me.” Aaron’s gaze drifted up to the ceiling. “It’s his responsibility to tell me when one of my pack is being a certified jackass.”
“Like it’s your responsibility to punish a wolf who commits a crime? Where was Adam when she almost revealed us to the whole world?”
“Her father is her alpha. He did what he felt was responsible, and there were extenuating circumstances.” Aaron went for the envelope and clicked the end on the table. “Her stunt at Joe’s isn’t the issue either. Something else is going on here.”
Allan got to his feet. “Well, it’s the issue for me.”
“That’s bullshit. And I expect you to deal with it by the time the Dubois leave tomorrow.”
“I am dealing with it.”
His brother opened the envelope, a patronizing note in his voice. “Ignoring her is not dealing with it. And fucking her is certainly not dealing with it.”
“I didn’t…”
One of Aaron’s fingers went up and Allan bit his tongue. With a shake of his head, the alpha pulled the documents out of the envelope, looking them over and thankfully moving on from the naked-dick-direction the conversation had been headed. “This is the report from the church that Elise said she’d read?”
“Yes. One of my deputies tracked it down and got a copy. Plus, that second page, that’s the listings from the church registry, and from the parish priest’s house that Elise thinks is where she was left.” He pointed to the last page. “The priest died years ago, and apparently, the nuns didn’t remember her.”
“What did you tell them this was regarding?” Aaron’s dark eyes turned suspicious. “You know I don’t like it when people know too much.”
“I told them I was running background on my cousin’s new wife. See if she had a criminal past she was hiding.” Allan put his hands on his hips. “No one knows anything. She was living as a human.”
“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” His alpha raised one eyebrow. “The man who wants to suppress his wolf.”
Something snapped inside, and Allan punched the table. “Will you all stop saying that? Fuck. I don’t want that. My wolf is what makes me who I am. It’s what makes me the best person to do my job. And protecting the humans… it’s what we… were made to do.” He retreated, like he’d taken one too many steps toward a cliff. His brother would hear the rhetoric and jump on it, like he always did.
But Aaron continued to read the papers while Allan calmed his breath, wishing he could take back everything he’d said. He didn’t want to talk about it any more. This was always the place where the conversation devolved into orders.
They hadn’t agreed on this subject since their mother died. Maybe before.
His brother put the forms down and met his eyes with a heavy sigh. “You know I support what you’re doing in town. But Adam says Reyna is pursuing you. You can not have sex with her like she’s some stranger you’ll never see again.”
“I told you, I didn’t have sex with her.”
“So she tied you to a tractor and left your pants open and… just walked away?”
Allan’s whole face heated. “Technically. Yes.”
“That’s unlikely.”
“Then ask her.”
Aaron sighed and flexed his head from side to side, his neck popping with each stretch. “We’ve got to deal with this Elise thing, and having her in our pack has inextricably bonded the Dubois family with ours. Even if she didn’t belong to them, Francis feels like she should have been his responsibility. Everything we do from here on out is going to affect them in some way. You can not fuck around with this relationship.”
The alpha-ness of Aaron’s last comment struck him hard in the chest. His first instinct was to fight. He didn’t care about relationships between the werewolf families. He only really cared about being able to serve the people of Somewhere.
Allan pushed off and backed away, always facing Aaron, showing as much respect as he could. “At some point, you’ve got to stop trying to be Dad.”
“And you’ve got to give up on this protect-the-humans shit.” The chair scraped across the floor as his brother stood. “You think we don’t see what this is about, but we do.”
Hot frustration caught him by the throat and Allan pulled his lips together. “Don’t.”
“No, someone has to call you on it.” Aaron pushed a closed fist into the table. “All this my true purpose stuff started after Mom, and Dad—”
“Don’t.” Allan’s eyes burned and a tightening in his windpipe threatened to cut off all oxygen.
“Listen to me.” With the alpha weight behind those words, Aaron made them land hard.
With a closed throat and a heavy chest and emotion threatening to spill all over his face, Allan tried to back away, but Aaron’s magick held him in place.
“You want to punish me, still, because I didn’t pick this life with you. But I’m not sorry I took on the alpha mantle.” Aaron licked his lips and looked at a spot somewhere in the middle of the table. “We all listen to the magick, Allan.”
Allan shook his head and whirled around, turning his back on the comment. He tried to walk away, but the alpha bond kept him glued to the hard floor. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I?” Aaron’s voice was almost hollow. “You think I didn’t notice when you stopped being on my side? You think it doesn’t hurt when you keep trying to cut us out of your life? This is just one more way of giving me the finger.”
The stop in his throat grew bigger with each moment he had to stay in the dining room. He rolled his tongue around his teeth and tried not to blink. He hated it when Aaron did this. It was hard enough being in this house, with disappointment waiting around every corner. But for Aaron to bring up the past.
“This isn’t about you.”
“The hell it isn’t. You’ve been punishing me for years for not fighting Dad when he gave up being alpha. You wanted me to say no and I couldn’t.”
Allan kicked at the table leg, fisting his hand so hard, his knuckles burned. “I am finally the Sheriff of Somewhere, Aaron.” He pushed at the emotion, pressing his toes hard against the floor, trying to get his feet to moving. “I finally have the ability to use my wolf to do what I was made to do, and you want me to give all that up and move back here and be your enforcer again.”
“That’s bullshit.” Aaron came forward, stopping just short of the end of the table. “I never forced you to choose.”
“You did. And when you chose the wolves, I chose the humans.”
With a sigh, his brother turned back to take his chair again. “You don’t have to choose just one.”
Allan ground his teeth together, grunting out, “Can I go now? I have work to do before the fucking run.”
Aaron shook his head for a long, silent moment and suddenly, the alpha magick released. Allan stalked through the house, slamming the heavy front door behind him. He slid into his Blazer, breathing hard and trying to ignore the emotion growing in his chest.
His brother couldn’t be more wrong. He had made Allan choose. When he decided to be the alpha instead of follow the path they’d always been on. Together.
Aaron could go fuck himself.
Allan turned the key and drove the Blazer down the long road to Somewhere, but the hot frustration didn’t vacate his chest. By the time he pulled up to his little house, the heat had spread through his chest, caught him by the throat, and threatened to break all his resolve. He couldn’t afford to let himself get spun like this. He was taking the last step in his plan, letting Laurel find him the wife to complete his package.
Don’t question the plan.
He wiped at his itching nose as he keyed open his front door. He didn’t need any more head games. He had a feeling that one more confrontation with Reyna was coming, and he had to give himself one last will-of-steel fortification to protect himself from Fate.
But the house… the house was… He flipped on a light.
The house was freaking spotless. Everything had been picked up and put away. He could hear strange noises coming from his kitchen, and hurried through the living room, trying to keep himself from being seen.
With her head in the oven and her ass in the air, Reyna was humming to herself. And fuck. She looked like a rodeo queen.
She’d put on an 80s-puffy jean skirt with high brown cowboy boots and a tight jean shirt. When she turned around, her eyes went wide and she squealed. She closed the oven door with one booted foot and peeled off two big, red oven mitts.
Her shirt wasn’t her typical corset, but it still hung open just enough for him to get a good eyeful of cleavage. Dammit, I want her.
“Hi, honey.” Her singsongy voice enticed him to take another step forward. “You’re home.”
Chapter Ten
“Wha—”
She held up one finger to silence him, surprised when his mouth actually snapped shut. “Hang on, before you go get all bent out of shape.” Reyna waltzed over to the fridge and pulled out a beer for Allan. “I got everything put away. Your laundry is done. The house is clean enough to eat from any surface. And,” she said, throwing out another Oscar winning southern belle squeal. “I’ve got lunch warm on the stove and an apple pie in the oven.”
He stared at the beer bottle she’d handed him and sniffed the air.
Reyna smiled. Nana’s famous gumbo was simmering on the stove. The sausage and shrimp filled the kitchen with a tantalizing aroma of home. Hopefully Texan men liked gumbo, she’d only ever learned how to cook from her Mama and Nana’s recipes and they were as Cajun as they came. “Hungry?”
He nodded, wide-eyed and silent. Finally.
“Let me grab you a bowl. I’ve got a pan of fresh cornbread too.”
Reyna turned toward the stove and tugged another button open on the ridiculous denim shirt she had on and tied around her waist. She looked like a cowgirl-hooker-Barbie, but if this is what he wanted, she had nothing to lose except her pride. Hopefully he wouldn’t want her to dress like this all the time, but keeping the mate Fate had shown her was more important than clothes or how she acted around the house.
After hearing him meet with that matchmaker earlier this morning, she’d jumped into this circus with both booted feet.
After grocery shopping, flea-market hopping for the outfit, and scrubbing his not-so-dirty house, she’d gotten everything ready for him to walk through his front door into the fantasy he’d asked Laurel to find him. There wasn’t a damn thing on his list—except the human bit—that she couldn’t fulfill. She might not be little Suzy Homemaker with blonde poufy hair, but she could cook and clean and stay home and raise the kids if that’s what he really needed.
Not participating in pack politics or acting as an enforcer any longer might sting a bit, but she’d just have to get used to it. She’d never wanted a man as much as she hungered for Allan VonBrandt. She’d lost too much in her short life. She would find a way to get him to want the mate bond. Losing him was as much an option as losing her sanity. His scent made her mouth water to taste him again.
He set the bottle on the counter with a hard clink. “You…you’re all different.”
“Don’t you like it?”
“I don’t know how to answer that question.” The gravelly coarseness of his voice made her knees wobbly. “Why did you do this?”
“You want a wife. A homemaker. You don’t need a human for that.”
“Reyna.” He came up behind her, pinning her between his hard body and the edge of the counter. There was a note of desperation in his voice and she leaned back into him, sighing.
“You don’t need a human to get what you want. Plus, you skip the awkward conversation with me to explain why our kids shift into a wolves on the full moon when they hit puberty.”
“Okay, that’s…” He groaned as she rubbed her ass against his growing erection. “That’s… something I hadn’t thought of before, but—”
“I can cook, clean, do PTA, book club. Whatever it is that normal people do. I can be what you want, better than any human female. I can dress differently. Whatever you want. I just…” She stopped herself from begging and arched her chest instead. She’d rather use her body than her words. Taking his hand from its slack position at his side, she slid it up her body until her breast was in his palm.
She squeezed his hand and moaned deep in her throat. His fingers moved on their own, massaging her until a burning heat gathered in her abdomen.
Twisting in his grasp, she peered up into his lust-glazed-eyes. His warm brown irises glowed bright with his wolf’s hunger. At least she had his beast on her side. Perhaps that would be enough eventually to sway the man as well.
“The food is all on warm. It will wait.” She rubbed the pad of her thumb across his lips and slid her hand around to the back of his head, pulling gently until he bent close enough to kiss.
She caressed his lips with the tip of her tongue until they parted. Thrusting her tongue deep between his lips, she moaned as the taste of him filled her mouth.
A second later his arms encircled her body and he kissed her back, crushing his lips against hers until no air remained inside her lungs. Allan growled into her mouth and lifted her off the floor. The rooms and hallway
passed in a blur.
They entered his bedroom and she gasped for breath as his mouth moved from hers to her neck and then further south, removing clothing as he encountered it. The shirt ripped into two pieces shortly before he tossed it across the room.
She nodded. “Yes.” Gods, yes. Please. Finally. The clasp of her bra popped between his deft fingers and she sighed when the girls burst free.
“Come and get me cowboy,” she murmured, letting her head drop backward as he caressed her breasts and closed his lips around one nipple and then the other. His mouth tugged, sending darts of pleasure coursing straight to her clit. The un-sealed mate bond between them swirled and pounded as their magick entwined.
Bonding would come later. He would say the spell soon. She could wait a few minutes longer…she’d waited this long already.
Allan made short work of the ruffled denim skirt and lacy panties, sending them sailing across the semi-dark room to join the remnants of her shirt. Everything was perfect. Everything was set and ready. Curtains closed. Sheets clean. The shower. The tub. She’d prepared for anything.
She yanked his uniform shirt loose from the khaki pants. A white undershirt still blocked her hands from the warmth of his skin. “You need to be naked, too.”
Allan growled, but wrenched both shirts over his head with one tug and shucked out of his pants in what had to be record time. His erection jutted out from a nest of dark curled hair, hungry and hard.
Her clit throbbed, excitement building and coiling inside. Her eyes widened when she looked up and met his gaze again. He wanted her. He really did. He was taking what she offered. Accepting her as his mate. She sucked in a quick breath, trying to ward off the tears welling in her eyes.
Focus Reyna. Sex is the goal right now, not turning into a mushy ball of female hormones. Still, Reyna wished he’d say something. All she’d heard since they left the kitchen were growls and groans. It wouldn’t kill him to speak a little. To assure her that he’d changed his mind. That he saw her as his mate. Wanted her as his mate.
To Catch A Mate: Somewhere, TX (VonBrandt Pack Book 5) Page 6